“I work at Colindale,” said Natalya with a smile Ben recognised as not spectacularly friendly.
“Right,” said Dr Anathan, her hand on the edge of the door, gently shoving her dog back inside.
“My name is Natalya Yagoda,” said Natalya.
Ben had never seen someone’s expression collapse into anger with such speed before. It was as if someone had turned Dr Anathan inside out and tucked away her polite demeanour behind a snarling mask. “GET OFF MY PROPERTY,” snapped Dr Anathan, trying to slam the door.
Natalya inserted her foot into the gap and said, “What’s the problem?” with the kind of icy calm that Ben would have happily spent a decade in therapy to achieve.
“You’re trespassing,” Dr Anathan said, trying to shut the door on Natalya’s foot.
“Why are you more keen to bruise than talk to a fellow researcher?” Natalya asked, putting her hand flat on the door.
“I don’t have to speak to you,” Dr Anathan growled. In contravention of her sudden anger, the Jack Russell only yapped happily and, wagging, tried to squeeze out between several legs without much success.
“I would like to know,” said Natalya, with dignity, “why you are so convinced of the natural origins of the virus I am working on.”
“And for that you come all the way to my house and threaten me?” barked Dr Anathan. “Bob, get back inside.”
“No one is threatening you,” Ben said, startled.
“I would be interested to hear,” Natalya went on, setting her jaw as Dr Anathan shoved the door into her foot again, “how you came by a source of information confirming a natural origin for the koneboget virus and why that information hasn’t been made available to my employers.”
“You,” Dr Anathan said breathlessly, “should learn to take challenges to your theories like an adult and not come and intimidate the people who make them!”
Natalya looked down at her foot where it was wedged into door, and back up at Dr Anathan’s face, contorted in rage. “Normal practice,” she said, pushing the door back from her foot a little, “is to allow those challenges to be examined to see if they are robust.” She gave Dr Anathan a withering look. “You are a scientist.”
“You don’t have any right to come and demand things from me,” Dr Anathan snapped. “None at all to come here and pretend to be a woman and bring some — what are you doing?”
Ben continued to focus his phone. “Just making sure I have a record of how you behave when you’re asked by a fellow-professional for help,” he said, attempting to imitate Natalya’s peaceful indifference despite a wildly beating heart. “You never know who might be interested to know that you’re obstructive and transphobic.”
Dr Anathan underwent a second metamorphosis, from angry to utterly furious: she seemed to get taller, and definitely grew redder, and a lot louder. The small dog behind her began barking excitedly and throwing himself against her legs. “WHO THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?”
Ben had been intending to shrug and, at worst, say, someone who is recording you losing your shit in a very embarrassing way, but what came out of his mouth, in a detached and almost pleasant voice, was: “My sister is dying, and if it turns out that you’re in any way complicit in that, I’m the person who is never going to let you have a quiet moment again.”
There was an unexpected silence, into which Bob the Jack Russell barked monotonously and with no feeling for the general situation. A car passed on the road behind them: Ben’s fingers grew even colder holding up the phone. He felt somehow relieved that there was a screen between him and Dr Anathan’s face, even if he could see every detail of her indignant rage displayed before him.
Dr Anathan raised a shaky finger and pointed it at Ben, and therefore at his camera. “I will not,” she said, and her voice was not entirely steady either, “be held responsible for someone’s sense of familial guilt.”
“No,” agreed Natalya, who had been momentarily framed out of the conflict, “but you will be held responsible for complicity in complicating search for solutions to this disease which has already killed, and is killing a lot of people, including his sister, if you’re holding back information on origins that could help—” she took a deep breath, “—out of greed, or pride. You are an embarrassment.”
Dr Anathan turned her attention back to Natalya, and on the screen her line of sight lifted. “I’m an embarrassment?” she demanded.
Ben was almost impressed. The severity of Natalya’s speech would have made him crawl inside himself and never speak to anyone again had it been directed at what an embarrassment he was.
“Just by the way,” Ben added, as it came to him, “you don’t happen to have any professional relationship with Simon Crawford, do you?”
Dr Anathan gave a shaky laugh, comprised apparently from equal parts anger and fear. “Why? Do you have some kind of mad conspiratorial theory that I murdered him? That he was murdered? Is that it?” she asked, apparently having forgotten that she was trying to slam the door into Natalya’s foot again.
Ben glanced sideways at Natalya, trying not to let his phone wobble. Natalya frowned back at him with similar confusion: neither of them had considered any such possibility. Ben said: “So…you apparently are afraid of that?”
Dr Anathan slammed her mouth shut and said nothing.
“Maybe you worked for the same people,” Ben added, gently.
“Oh for God’s sake,” Dr Anathan said with another shaky, furious laugh. “Do your homework. There are plenty of companies, plenty of funders who spread their money out over a lot of projects. Of course we’ve worked for the same people. Anyone who has private finance has probably worked for the same goddamn people. Your freak friend here’s shared an employer with some dubious characters, working for the British government—”
“You’re not selling yourself very well,” Ben told her.
“Do you have some financial connection to work on KBV treatment?” Natalya asked, stony-faced. “By any chance. Dr Anathan. Is that what is keeping you quiet?” She pressed her hand gently against the door again, accidentally blocking Ben’s shot and forcing him to duck to keep Dr Anathan in frame. “Ben here is a journalist. You know he can find out what contracts you have.”
Ben not only highly doubted this but was extremely aware that this particular kind of information was the kind that got you sued to kingdom come for publishing or even sometimes trying to obtain, but apparently neither Dr Anathan nor Natalya did.
“All kinds of confidential matter comes to light eventually, Dr Anathan,” said Natalya in a flat voice. “It can be subpoenaed.”
Dr Anathan looked at Natalya. She looked at Ben’s camera, and she said, “They have better lawyers than your shitty newspaper.”
“I’ve been offered a contract with XXXXXXXXX,” said Ben, neglecting to mention that he hadn’t taken it up. “They have really really good lawyers.”
“If,” said Dr Anathan, raising her finger again — it was still shaking, along with her voice, “okay, if a company had asked my opinion on an undiscovered ebola-like non-filovirus nine years ago, a zoonotic virus from Central Asia—” she stopped, and pushed the dog back again.
Before anyone else could intervene, she was off again:
“If I’d been asked to contribute some of my research and understanding of capsid proteins in that area to help them work on preventing its spread,” Dr Anathan took a deep breath. “If I had done something like that, I wouldn’t be complicit in what that company then did with the information they had purchased. I wouldn’t be held responsible for what they did or did not decide to do with it, and whether they made their knowledge of the existence of that virus public, especially when that virus wasn’t heard of by anyone else right then, let alone any kind of an epidemic. It didn’t even have a name.”
Ben could have laughed at how feeble this was, this attempt at diversion, had the situation not been so tense. Instead he took a breath and cut off Natalya’s next question.
“Supposing that hy
pothetical situation had occurred, which obviously it hasn’t,” he said, as warmly as he could, “which company would have been the one to ask you about it?”
Dr Anathan laughed at him.
“Do you know if they contacted Simon Crawford about this?” Ben suggested.
Dr Anathan narrowed her eyes. “If you’re trying to make me feel guilty,” she said, “it’s not going to work.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” said Ben.
“I heard he’d committed suicide,” said Dr Anathan, apropos of little. Another car passed them. “I only know his name from papers. He might have worked for them. He might have had some of his work funded by them. They fund a lot of work.”
“Including yours?”
“They fund a lot of work,” Dr Anathan reiterated, angrily.
Natalya heaved a great sigh. “It was XXXXX/XXXXXX,” she said, exasperated. “We already know. And you, you think you’re either protecting your financial interests, or,” Natalya waved her hand, “physical ones. Perhaps you think Crawford is a victim of conspiracy after all. I do not. Perhaps you are wise to protect yourself like this.”
Before Dr Anathan could finish opening her mouth to give a derisive answer or reject the claim, Natalya slammed the heel of her hand into the door between Ben and Dr Anathan’s heads.
“But people are dying,” Natalya finished, her nostrils flaring. She had barely raised her voice, but Ben felt like someone had just roared, or possibly set off a bomb in the vicinity. “His sister is dying. I — more people will die.” She drew herself up straight and said, “You are letting this happen.”
Dr Anathan reared back from her own door and said, “Lydia Kells was also consulted by them about a zoonotic virus with similarities to lyssa.”
“The Australian?” said Natalya, leaving Ben at sea.
“That’s how I worked out,” said Dr Anathan in a dead voice, “after your work was published, that perhaps they’d been talking about KBV.”
Ben held his breath.
“So you see,” said Dr Anathan, quiet as the grave, “they’ve known about it for a long time before the first cases came to light.” There was an edge of triumphalism in her voice all the same.
“You were still involved—” Ben began.
“They were already working on a solution, before your shitty little government agency.” The defensive triumphalism was much more than a mere edge now. “No one was forcing them to share that information.”
“Except every kind of scientific ethics—” Natalya grunted.
“They’re a goddamn private company,” Dr Ananthan snapped, with an expression of contempt. “They paid a lot for my expertise and I don’t like the idea of being sued for breach of confidence.”
Natalya removed her hand from the door and said in tones of ringing disgust that made Ben’s insides shrivel up, “If I were you I would like a lot less the thought of being responsible for genocide by greedy neglect.” She curled her lip. “But we all have different priorities.”
“How dare you,” Dr Anathan snarled. “How dare you stand on my property and insinuate that I don’t care about human life, you—”
“Just for the record,” said Ben, gently tapping the side of his phone, “would you mind telling me how you’d feel if your daughter contracted KBV?”
Dr Anathan wheeled around and glared into his camera with the kind of gorgon stare that had probably petrified far hardier journalists than him.
“Are you making some kind of threat?”
“No,” said Ben, “I’m just wondering if you’re capable of empathy.”
“Well,” said Dr Anathan, her voice shaking again. “You can take your threats, and your insinuations, and you can jam them into your own eyeball. Unlike you, trespassing on my property and harassing me, I have never done anything that breaks the goddamn law, and if you try to drag me into the courts because I accepted money to help work on a cure for something you’ll find the law agrees with me.” She took a deep breath, and wheeled around to glare up at Natalya instead. “And if you were any good,” she added, “instead of some freak masquerading as a scientist, you’d know KBV has a zoonotic origin and was amplified by concentrations of people living together and environmental upheaval, just like every other so-called ‘mystery virus’ that’s turned up in the last century.”
Impassive in the face of more abuse, Natalya nodded slowly, and said, “Of course, it is a mere coincidence that a segment of gene code in KBV is an almost-perfect match for one patented by the laboratory you ran twelve years ago and purchased by XXXXX/XXXXXX.”
Ben blinked.
“If you don’t get the hell out now,” said Dr Anathan. “I’m going to call the police.”
Natalya started to laugh. She laughed long, and loud, and without a trace of humour, directly in Dr Anathan’s face.
“Yes,” Natalya said, “they’re very helpful.”
She removed her foot from Dr Anathan’s door and walked away without another word: Ben remained long enough to film Dr Anathan slamming the door on him, and followed her.
“That could have gone better,” said Ben, as Natalya bounced the car over a series of speed bumps. When he’d finished having his head hammered against the ceiling, he took out his Macbook and connected his phone to it: in part to back up the video without having to rely on Bluetooth taking forever, this far from a reliable Wifi connection, but mostly to charge it after so much continual use.
“Not likely,” said Natalya, grappling with the one-way system. “She is guilty and upset that her work has been used in a way not beneficial and now she is not being allowed to fix what has happened. We have hit a nerve.”
“You think?” Ben frowned. “I thought she was just being, uh, venal and self-interested?”
Natalya shook her head. “No. Professional guilt. Dr Anathan is not a monster.”
“You’re very certain.”
Natalya gave him a thin smile. “Monsters do not stay in research as long as she did,” she said. “They move into funding. Or pharmaceutical PR.”
“Hey,” Ben said, checking the progress of the transfer, trying to hold his Macbook and phone in place and simultaneously anchor himself in a wildly bouncing seat, “I have a friend who did that.”
“Was he a monster?” Natalya asked, making a dash for what looked like a main road and probably wasn’t.
Ben thought about this for a while, and made a so-so gesture with one hand. “He had his moments.”
They were back onto the dual carriageway again, and making good progress, when the fog descended.
“Good old British weather,” Ben murmured.
Natalya slowed the car a little, much to his relief.
“You mentioned no sister before,” Natalya said, at last.
Ben looked out at the gathering fog and the dim red tail lights in front of them. “I didn’t mean to mention her then,” he said.
“What is she like?” Natalya asked, meditative.
“Symptomatic,” said Ben, rubbing his eyes. His contact lenses felt as if they were about to catch fire.
Natalya nodded, once, and said, “Before.”
“I don’t even know,” Ben admitted, addressing his knees. “I didn’t really know her. It. I.” He peered out of the side window, but the faint outlines of dead trees in the mist gave him little distraction. “When my parents got divorced.” He stopped again. “They made a horrible, horrible mess of it. Everything went to shit for years and then they finally got divorced and my Dad took me and dropped Leah on my mum and we didn’t see each other for years and years and now Dad blames my Mum for Leah getting KBV because ‘she made her like that’ and he doesn’t get that if he hadn’t just dropped her she wouldn’t have been around Mum to get ‘like that’ and oh god I’m talking shut up.”
Natalya ignored this sudden, horrifying slide into a therapy session and only said, “Your mother was infected also?”
“No,” said Ben. “No, he means…Leah probably caught it from someone while s
he was travelling. And Leah travelled everywhere because, because that was normal to her.”
Natalya nodded. “Your mother?”
“Don’t know where she is,” said Ben, promptly. “Never know where she is. Sometimes she sends postcards. She. She travels all over the world and gets arrested at demonstrations a lot.”
“A woman of convictions,” Natalya concluded.
“Hundreds,” Ben said weakly. “She’s a great person but she’s shit at being a mum. Leah just, I guess, I guess she just picked all that up.”
“Older or younger?”
“Older,” Ben said, clutching the door handle as the car slowed to an even more geriatric crawl. “Older. I met up with her when she got back to the UK last time and we went to Harrods and she shoplifted a meat pie for a picnic. And then three months later she was taken into quarantine.” Which meant, as he had contemplated far too often since, that she had already been infected when they met.
He ran his free hand over his face. There was another long silence, deadened by the fog, and he burrowed inside his coat. Ben began, slowly, to wish he’d never opened his mouth at all.
Natalya said, softly. “I’m very sorry.”
“You of all people don’t need to apologise,” Ben said, in alarm. He waved his hand between them and nearly hit his knuckles on the handbrake. “I mean—”
Natalya shook her head, staring into the fog ahead. “Of all people I most need to. My job.”
“Your job isn’t to be Wonderwoman,” said Ben, repositioning his bag between his legs. “God. She’s not dying because of you. You’ve done nothing wrong.”
“Have I done enough right,” Natalya asked the fog in front of her. “HPA have been walking in the…in the dark…in the fog. We could have done more.”
Ben gave her an alarmed look. “You’re talking in the past tense, is that on purpose?”
Natalya shrugged. “How much more can I do now?”
“There’s still time for you,” Ben said in a near whisper. “You can do something.”
Natalya nodded slowly. “Yes,” she said, as the car rolled slowly forward. I have time. There is still time for me.”
The Next Big One Page 24